Quotes About Hobbesian

German idealism is a return to the premodern on an 'English' and therefore insufficient basis... the German idealistic concept of freedom is a synthesis of the premodern concept of virtue with the Hobbesian-Lockean concept of subjective right as the morally fundamental fact.

But further, Hobbesian individualism required that traditional independent social authorities be eliminated or suppressed. Benjamin Constant, who was a keen observer of the French Revolution, explained why: "The interests and memories which spring from local customs contain a germ of resistance which is so distasteful to authority that it hastens to uproot it. Authority finds private individuals easier game: its enormous weight can flatten them out effortlessly as if they were so much sand.

Today, of course, the redistributive powers of Congress are everywhere -- except in the Constitution. The result is the feeding frenzy that is modern Washington, the Hobbesian war of all against all as each tries to get his share and more of the common pot the tax system fills. ... It is unseemly and wrong. More than that, it is unconstitutional, whatever the slim and cowed majority on the New Deal Court may have said.

The Hobbesian state of nature is really just a state of total market failure. Out of this state of nature, we have been able to build up a set of institutions that promote co-operation and therefore improve efficiency. Markets are one institution of this type. But they are extremely limited in their range, since property rights apply only to a tiny fraction of the ingredients we require for successful living.

The life of a farmer is increasingly Hobbesian—poor, nasty, and brutish, even if not always short. It has been my own experience that many who still rise to that challenge today are themselves hard-nosed, peculiar, dogmatic, and distasteful characters, better appreciated at a distance, myself perhaps included. My purposes in deviating somewhat from a 'professional' stance are threefold.

The world is a Hobbesian state of nature in which the struggle for domination is the very essence of international life.

The core of this ideology is the marginalization of the public good in favour of Hobbesian self-interest: fear